Greetings from J-List July 30, 2001

Hello from the New J-List! We're happy to take the wraps off the all-new J-List homepage!

The new J-List site represents many months of hard work, and it includes some features we've wanted to incorporate into the site for years. First and foremost is the #1 request from customers -- full product search -- allowing you to search for just products with the keywords you want. The search is smart, too, allowing you to search for either "Bunko Kanazawa" (English name order) or "Kanazawa Bunko" (Japanese word order). Similiarly, you can search for "bishojo" or "bishoujo" and get the same results. When you add an item to your shopping cart, the new J-List site will make suggestions for other items you may also be interested in. By popular demand, we've brought back the thumbnail, full size and text viewing options while viewing, and now they're "sticky" -- choose one viewing option, and that option stays "on" while you view items. The way you view the various categories and sub-categories has been improved, too, and we've done away with the frames as well. Your address information is saved for you, allowing you to check out quickly without typing your address after the first time, and when you check out, you'll be presented with accurate shipping charges for SAL, Airmail, EMS and seamail. As we created this new site, we tried not just to add new features, but to keep things that should be kept the same untouched. While the new site is being tested and put through its paces, we've left the old site up, in case you ever try to access the new page and find it inaccessible (say, because we're recompiling the shopping cart program). You can access the old J-List pages from the index page at http://www.jlist.com/ . Please let us know how we've done!

Well, the textbook issue continues to cause tension between Korea and Japan, with a few in Korea calling for the severing of relations with Japan. The relationship of Japan and Korea is an incredibly complex one, that can't be easily understood by outsiders. I've always thought the two countries were quite similar to England and Ireland in many ways -- the power in the East tries to colonize the weaker country to the west, trying not just to conquer it, but to erase its native language and replace it with Japanese. If you'd like to read up on the individual issues that Korea and China have objected to in Japan's latest history textbook, see this article from the Korean Herald: http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/textbook/textbook.shtml .

Since we love DVD but hate the anti-globalistic efforts of DVD machine makers to divide the world into exclusive DVD regions, we've

For this first official update of the All New J-List, we have some very nice items for you. They include:

• First of all, we're happy to announce that the third bishoujo game release from Peach Princess, Water Closet, is now shipping! This is a great exploration of various fetish themes, with a hilarious story in which you play from the point of view of one of five female characters (including the first-ever Canadian bishoujo game character). We think Water Closet is a great game!
  
• We've got some excellent magazines, including the new Urecco, with one of the most lovely cover models we've ever seen -- Megumi Yasu
  
• Also popular with J-List customers, the lovely new Cream, featuring sweet Japanese sailor uniform models and more -- this issue is extra special because it features the "first nude" of Yuina Mizuki, age 18, and more
  
• For fans of classic magazines, we've got some mid-1990's issues of Urecco posted for you (see magazine page 2)
  
• If you like Japan's hentai games, see the new issue of Push, which is extra-cool because it features a CD-ROM with game images and demos to play with
  
• Also a popular item: fresh stock of the August 2000 DVD & Video CD Soft Catalog, a nifty magazine + dual VCD magazine that gives you up to 2 hours of cool AV fun for a very low price
  
• For photobook fans, we have a super item, Back Yellows, featuring 47 lovely amateur Tokyo girls exposing their nudity for you, as well as some classic issues of Nowon
  
• G-Taste is a fantastic series of erotic color art books by Hiroki Yagami, and feature his wonderful and highly erotic characters. We've restocked most of the G-Taste books for you!
  
• We have a rare and cool erotic ukiyoe photobook, filled excellent 19th century erotica (we only have one copy though)
  
• If you love our manga selection, we hope you'll like the new search features, which make it easier than ever to find the manga you want. We've also posted some great new volumes, as well as fresh stock of a dozen popular (but previously sold out) items, just for you
  
• For yaoi fans, we've got some nice items, including Be Boys Zips 26 and Slave & Master (wow, such interesting titles)
  
• If doujinshi is your true love, we've got the new TGWOA manga ("The Great Work of Alchemy"), filled with great hentai doujinshi themes
  
• We've got some nice erotic videos for you: Sanity or Insanity (an exploration of masochism among Japan's female college students), and Junna Shiina's great "Lovely Days" video
  
• For DVD lovers, we've got some excellent items for you too: Miho Fukada's wonderful sexual performance in 5.1 Dolby surround with super multi-angle, as well as Manami Yoshii's super cosplay performance as "Heart Captor Manami"
  
• Also for fans of rare hentai DVD from Japan, we've got vol. 1 of the Night Shift Hospital hentai anime by the former doujinshi artist Tachibana Seven
  
• If you love Japan's wonderful anime characters, we've got two excellent magazines available by monthly revolving subscription. Megami Magazine is a fantastic anime magazine that is literally overflowing with fantastic presents for you -- 13 double-sided color posters, stickers, punch-out desktop characters, and more. Then, Ultra Jump is a super monthly manga magazine with 450 pages of great manga for all manga fans, including the popular Bastard!! series, and more
  
• By customer request, we've gotten in fresh stock of the Love Hina "bilingual" manga, which feature both English and Japanese -- a great way to enjoy these great manga stories
  
• We've organized the Wacky Things from Japan into several sub-categories, for your browsing convenience. If you love Hello Kitty, check out the very cool Watercolor Set we've got on the Cute Things from Japan page
  
• Finally, announcing the Wacky Things from Japan $1 sale! We've gotten some really bizarre and wonderful Wacky items over the years. We're having a super $1 sale to allow you to get some cool things from Japan and help us make room for even more Wacky stuff.
  

Okay, come see us on the web!

Greetings from J-List June 28, 2001

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Greetings from J-List June 25, 2001

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Greetings from J-List June 21, 2001

Hello again from your friends in Japan, the staff of J-List!

In any language, words have slightly different meanings from words in other languages. The Japanese word omoshiroi corresponds to the word "interesting," but it also has a connotation of "funny" (like a joke), which is new if you're used to English. In a similar vein, some Japanese words and concepts just "work" differently in Japanese. One is the word "friend," which is tomodachi in Japanese. In english, the word friend is used quite loosely, and is sometimes applied to someone who isn't a close friend, but it just someone you know or meet sometimes, or even of a person you're romantically involved with. In Japanese, tomodachi would only be used for a fairly close friend that was close in age to you -- it would be almost impossible to have a tomodachi that was much older or much younger than you. Other words are used for other casual relationships, such as shiriai (acquaintance), or if the person is above or below you in a school or organization, words like senpai and kouhai just "fit" better. I've got a friend who's got his own English school, and he's 52 years old. In relationships that are based in Japanese, it would be almost impossible for me to think of him as my friend -- the Japanese word just doesn't work that way.

My six-year-old son Kazuki has teacher a great milestone: he's lost his first tooth. Naturally, I wanted to follow what is done in the States, putting the pillow under my son's pillow so the Tooth Fairy could put money under his pillow. My wife, however, wanted to follow Japanese the way, in which the tooth is thrown onto the roof of your house (if it was a lower tooth), or thrown under the house (if it was an upper tooth). In the end, we compromised and did both. Kazuki wanted the tooth fairy to bring him some American money, until I reminded him that he couldn't buy anything with American money in Japan.

The California energy crisis strikes again! A rolling blackout at our ISP in San Diego caused the J-List site to go down for a few hours on Wednesday. We're hard at work on the new server, which has, among other things, a separate gasoline generator to keep things on even if the lights go out. We hope to have some good news for you soon.

For this evening's update, we've got some nice items prepared for you, including:

• Many new 18+ products for our adult customers
  
• If you like J-List's wacky food and snack offerings, we've got more for you to try. One is a delicious "dry curry" mix (similar to fried rice, but flavored with delicious curry powder), and for rice lovers, packets of Ochazuke, which is a delicious and wholesome food you eat with rice
  
• For Play Station 2 fans, we've got limited stock of the current Dengeki Play Station magazine, filled with information on the hottest PS2 games from Japan
  
• Updated "Wacky" items incude Japanese lacquerware bowls and coaster, new unique items for ladies, and more!
  

Remember that J-List carries the most unique selection you will ever find of Japanese gum, snacks like Pocky and Pretz, and more. Please browse our site to find our unique products.

Greetings from J-List June 18, 2001

Hello and Happy Monday from your friends at J-List!

It's said in Japan that the U.S. is a "horizontal society" and Japan is a "vertical society," supposedly due to the fact that life in the U.S. being merit-based (if you work hard, you can enjoy the fruits of you labor directly) whereas progression up the "social ladder" in Japan is often based on age and seniority. It's certainly true that relationships here are very up-down, with a clear idea that the older you are (or the longer you've been in a certain organization), the more "erai" (high-level) you are. This concept is all around you when you're in Japan, you can't get away from it -- it's even built into the language. When a younger person speaks to an older person, even if he's just one year older, he must use "keigo," or polite Japanese, which effectively organizes everyone in the room according to level in a way that is impossible even to consider in American English. To not use the "right" language for your level is disconcerting to others, and makes you sound "cheeky." It sounds odd, but it actually makes relationships work more smoothly here -- it's almost like a networking protocol, TCP/IP for humans.

One interesting concept in Japan is that of senpai and kouhai, which could be translated as upperclassmen and underclassman, although this would only apply to students in school. Basically, higher-level individuals (either because of age or seniority) in a school or organization are senpai, and those who entered the school or organization after are kouhai. Senpai have various responsibilities to their kouhai, to teach and guide them. When I was an English teacher and met new teachers who had just come to Japan to teach, I assumed my role as senpai and took them around, as others did for me when I first arrived in Japan.

We're going to be moving to the new J-List server soon, but in the meantime, we experienced some technical problems over the weekend, which caused the "temporary" order form to misbehave. We've linked the order form buttons to the secure email form, which still works, so secure orders can be accepted without problems. Please note, though, that the secure certificate on the server is giving a "certificate has expired" browser error currently, due to our server problem. If you're concerned about submitting credit card details through the secure email form, please feel free to send us your order by fax or voice mail (the number is (619) 839-3745). If you're ordering through Paypal/Billpoint, or with check/money order, or if you have a card on file with us, we can of course accept orders through email. Thanks, as always, for your understanding during this temporary period.

For this evening's update, we've got some nice items for you, including:

• Some interesting new 18+ products for our adult customers
  
• If you love Japanese girls, we submit that you'll love the charming swimsuit idol Chikako Hatsumi, a lovely creature in a great idol DVD from SOD
  
• Love Japanese snacks and food? We've got some interesting items for you, including authentic "ume-boshi" (very tart dried plums that are delicious), and some Power Rangers "furikake" (dried nori and scrambled egg, which you put on white rice -- kids love it) featuring the next series from Japan, Gao Ranger
  
• If you love cute things from Japan, we hope you'll check out the "Wacky Things from Japan -- cute items" page. We've posted several new items, including a Hello Kitty lunchbox, a cute Hello Kitty name tag, and more
  
• Finally, we've added some new items to our Wacky Things from Japan main page, including a new selection of Japanese washi paper (very useful and cool), the ultimate note holder for your desk (trust us! it's cool!) and more!
  

Are you an experienced graphic designer with knowledge of Illustrator? We're looking for someone who can help us design some interesting T-shirts, including some shirts promoting CM-Watch, our Japanese TV commercial site. If you're interested in helping, please drop us an email.

Greetings from J-List June 15, 2001

Hello again from your friends in Japan!

If you ever want to really learn a subject, try teaching it. I never knew how much I didn't know about my own native language until I became an English teacher in Japan, and it was a great experience for me. You become aware of so many aspects of your own language when you teach it. I also paid attention to the rules that govern English pronunciation. For example, North American speakers of English usually stress the second syllable of a three syllable word -- my son's name (Kazuki) is usually pronounced ka-ZOO-ki by English speakers, rather than with a slight stress on the first syllable. This "American accept" of Japanese sounds cute and pleasing to the Japanese however, and sometimes they go out of their way to use it -- TV commercials for the Konami game company here always end with an American saying the name of the company as "ko-NAH-me."

It's always interesting to compare the U.S. and Japan. In Japan, American-style breakfast cereal is slowly taking root, as Kellogg's Japan and Calbee battle for market share with their Corn Frosty and Choco Crispy products. (I never buy Kellogg's cereal here, it's way too expensive.) When I was growing up, I loved to find the little toys that came in cereal, but here, manufacturers haven't taken that approach. Instead of breakfast cereals, Japanese children can get their fix of silly toys from the monthly kids magazines that are so popular here, like Tomodachi and Tanoshii Yochien, which are magazines for kids which are also filled with fun things, from punch-out cardboard robots to Pokemon stickers or cards, little cardboard sushi so the girls can play "mother," and more. The competition among the magazines is fierce, though, and these magazines are always trying to come up with cooler things for the kids than their competitors.

Calling all big and little guys and girls! J-List has made a name for itself with funny and bizarre T-shirts with Japanese messages like "Hen na gaijin" (I'm a straight foreigner) and "watashi wa H" (I'm H). We're closing out our current T-shirts to make room for new designs, and we're just about there -- however, several of our shirts have sold out of sizes L and XL, leaving a few mediums and several size XXL shirts in stock. To help you help us get rid of these shirts, we've reduced the prices on them even more. Several of the shirts still come with free shipping, too, so they're really cheap. Check out the Wacky Japanese T-shirts page, now!

For this evening's update, we've got some more excellent items for you, including the following:

• First, we've got some great new magazines, including the charming new Video Boy and Best Video, which feature all the latest lovely AV idols from Japan, and Aishite Ageru ("I'll love you"), a popular sperm-fetish magazine
  
• We have some more of our popular "one shot" magazines, single issues posted at low prices. See them on near the top of magazine page 2
  
• For photobook lovers, we've got some nice items, including Kawai Azusa's busty photobook and several new hardcover items. We've also gotten in fresh stock of some items that had sold out recently, so check out the photobooks page
  
• We have another update to our manga pages, both Page 1 and Page 2 -- check out the all-new manga volumes we've posted (we think you'll like them)
  
• Also for manga and doujinshi fans, we've got fresh stock of the very cool Denno Buto Musume (Electronic Fighting Daughter), a series of super "game girl" hentai dojinshi stories compiled into a nifty anthology manga
  
• For dojinshi collectors, we've got a great selection of some cool single-issue dojinshi. However, since the automatic shopping cart is not working right now, the books might be sold already despite their appearing on the page as available. If the doujinshi you want to buy isn't available, we apologize in advance
  
• We have two excellent new DVDs in from Soft on Demand. In "Hitomi Ryo Best Selection," enjoy the best moments of this stylish AV idol's AV career. In "An Ideal Day of the Married Woman," see the unfaithful sexual acts of two Tokyo "hitozuma" (married women)
  
• Also very nice -- Kanazawa Bunko's Lovely Heroine, reissued on DVD at a lower price by Uchu Kikaku
  
• In the first Blue Sexual Desire series video, acclaimed AV director TOHJIRO got tired of filming Morishita Kurumi's sex and decided to taste her himself. Now, in volley two, he's going after the innocent Nagase Ai, in a self-directed adult video featuring himself as both cameraman and AV actor
  
• For fans of Japan's lovely swimsuit idols, we've got a new region-free DVD featuring the charming and lovely Ue Sayaka as she is filmed in bikini, sexy costumes, and even boxing gloves
  
• If you're a fan of Japan's zany professional wrestling characters, we've got a treat -- two very cool toys based on the Great Muta, a popular Japanese wrestler who "transforms" from his "normal self" into a supernatural being
  
• As noted above, we've reduced the prices on our remaining Funny Japanese T-shirts
  
• If you're a Pokemon fan, we've got exactly one copy of the 2001 desktop calendar in stock, discounted, on the anime and toys page
  
• Ever needed to write something in Japanese? Check out the katakana stickers on the stickers & signs page, wacky but also very useful
  
• Just in time for summer, a product that we at J-List love very much: Japanese mugi tea, a barley tea that is the runaway favorite of Japanese during the unbearable summer months. Now you can enjoy healthy mugi tea all the time, with the cold water tea bags we've got on the Japanese snacks and food page
  
• We've gotten in fresh stock of several of our unique flavors of Japanese gum
  
• Finally, our new Wacky Things from Japan include a bizarre new keychain/camera strap/key holder that's a zipper (yes, a zipper) -- zip it around your wrist to keep from losing your keys. Also, new katakana story books (for anyone trying to learn to write Japanese), and more!
  

There's been some kind of weird change in how credit card processing for the UK works, and the result has been some confusing address verification errors with UK buyers. We apologize in advance for any confusion, and will work to push your orders through with as little hassle as possible.

Greetings from J-List June 11, 2001

Hello again from Japan, where the Yellow Pages are called the Hello Pages.

Japan is reeling from a terrible tragedy this weekend. On Friday, a man entered an elementary school in Osaka and ran amock with a knife, killing 8 and injuring 13. The slain students were all first- and second-graders, aged 6 and 7, in what is one of the bleakest days in memory in Japan. Japan has had a string of tragic incidents of this kind over the past five years, including school stabbings with deadly "butterfly knives" of teachers by students, younger children by older bullies, as well as murders by young people. While nothing compared to the sad events that occur in the U.S., the terrible trend underscore instabilities with Japan's society. As a parent of young children, this unfortunate event has left my blood chilled.

The latest issue of Newsweek (the International edition, not the U.S. one) had an interesting story on the trend towards young people in Japan not caring to find full-time jobs. I've noticed this too -- more and more, a class of "freeters" (young people who prefer to work part-time jobs, changing every few months) is emerging. In Japan, there are three kinds of jobs: seishain (full-time jobs, with all benefits and annual bonuses), "part" (part-time jobs with some benefits), and arubaito (from the German word albeit, this word means week-to-week part time jobs). In the old days, life was very simple -- you studied hard to get into a good collge, entered a good company, and stayed there all your life. Now that lifetime employment is basically out the window, fewer young Japanese want to follow the same path their parents did. I wonder what repercussions this trend will have on Japan over the next decade or so?

One of the major complaints by foreigners living in Japan is the dentists here. Basically, Japanese dentists are famous for taking a certain job and making it take weeks. I've had three root canals done while living in Japan, and each time the dentist managed to break the work up into at least eight visits. I suspect that they do this because the Japanese medical insurance system limits the amount they can charge for each visit -- probably around $50 -- so they have to break up the job into many visits. Still, it's far from fun to have to go back again and again and again just to have a tooth filled.

If you look at the J-List site, you'll see that we've "forgotten" to end the 10% off on all magazine, manga, photobook and art book orders sale. We'll leave it up through the weekend, so if you want to save some money on that Golden Stage manga set or that Ohura Anna photobook you've had your eye on, we won't mind...

Greetings from J-List June 9, 2001

Hello again from Japan! It's good to be home, but the humidity of June in Japan is not exactly welcome...

One of the most unique and complex aspects of Japan is its education system. Ever since "discovering" outside culture through Korea and China, including Confusionistic ideas of appointing government officials according to academic rank, rather than who was who's son, Japan has thought deeply about the role of education in its society. Although it was held up during the late 80's as yet another area in which America lost to Japan, it's important to understand what the good and bad parts of the education system in Japan.

There are two "halves" to education in Japan. Throughout elementary and junior high, the goal of education is to create happy individuals who harmonize with each other through shared experiences -- a sports day here, a classwide field trip there, and most of all, the systematic learning of kanji. In each school year, students are assigned to a certain class, and are in that class all the time -- the teachers come and go as each hour goes by -- which is probably done to build social skills. In junior high school, there are "clubs" (volleyball club, ping pong club, English club, manga and anime club) and every student is required to join a club as a character-building excercise. Compulstory education in Japan is extremely centralized -- for example, there is one and only one textbook for students at a certain level to use, from Hokkaido to Okinawa. The keyword for the first half of education in Japan is "uniformity."

High school is not compulstory in Japan -- everyone is free to go or not go, although "chu-sotsu" (those who graduated from junior high school, without going on to high school) are seen in an extremely negative light here. For high school and college, the main idea is "competition" -- since there are many high schools and universities that a student can choose from, depending on his level of academic ability, students must study hard to get into the school of their choice. The extra work that students headed for high school or college put into their studies is one of the main benefits of the Japanese system -- nothing makes a student buckle down and study like having a goal. As Japan's population of children shrinks, however, making it possible for more students to go to a four-year university even without extra studying, this beneficial mechanism is at risk of breaking down.

Japan is taking a lot of flack these days for having some textbooks that gloss over Japan's attrocities during World War II. It's a shame that Japan lacks a greater awareness of what they did wrong during the war, but on the other hand, they're only human, too. All countries have national pride, and how they express history tells a lot about this. I was in college before I realized that even my own country has bent plenty of history in the name of citizenship, starting with George Washington and his cherry tree and ending with the glorification of certain parts of history that happen to give Americans a "warm, nationalistic feeling." Unfortunately I see no end in sight to the ongoing fight over Japan's self-awareness issue, and Korea and China will still be at odds with Japan on the "textbook issue" well into the future.

For this evening's update, we've got some nice items for you, including:

• First, we've got some great new magazines, including a great new issue of the "magazine of pretty girl-ism," Waffle
  
• For fans of the popular magazine + Video CD combination items, we've got the new Club Indies, a fantastic magazine featuring tons of excellent amateur AV for you
  
• We've got a great bunch of new hardcover photobooks, including Anzai Hiroko, Yoshida Satomi, and more
  
• A bizarre fetish that's fast growing in popularity are Japan's "medical" erotica, featuring sexual "check up" photos of beautiful girls playing doctor, and much more. See it all in the new Karte Club, on the high-end fetish photobooks page
  
• For our erotic manga customers, we have some nice new offerings, including new manga volumes by EC Comics, Angel Comics, AV Comics and more
  
• For lovers of Japan's erotic doujinshi, we have fresh stock of Nostalgia (uncensored Dirty Pair doujinshi) and Under the Influence (Gunsmith Cats and Gunbuster)
  
• For DVD collectors, there's a very cool item indeed -- the new Kozen DVD featuring a host of erotic performances by Ayukawa Ami. This 2-DVD set features all the cool features of DVD, including multi angle, multi story, and is *subtitled* in English, Chinese and Korean
  
• Fans of SOD's unique AV style should check out the new Go! Go! Magic Mirror Box Car DVD, featuring 120 minutes of sex behind a 1-way mirror, as well as "reverse nampa" in which three pretty girls lure men into the box car for some fun
  
• For hentai lovers, see the new Night Shift Hospital, vol. 1, featuring fully animated erotica by the extremely talented Tachibana Seven (formerly a doujinshi artist)
  
• We have two new erotic videos from SOD: Miyazawa Yuna as the "Ravished Campaign Girl," and the Queen of Indies, Morishita Kurumi, in a super "boxing glove fetish" video for you
  
• For fans of the popular Deep Kiss video series, we're happy to announce that we've lowered our prices on this series, which features the first "deep kiss" between girls, in an excellent exploration of female love
  
• If you love Japan's bishoujo ("pretty girl") games, we've got some cool items for you: beautiful bishoujo T-shirts, featuring images from Peach Princess's Little My Maid and Tokimeki Check in! Check out these shirts on the Wacky T-Shirts page or the Peach Princess games page
  
• For fans of our Japanese food page, we have two nifty items that you can fry up really easily: Glico's delicious "dry curry" (curry which you can prepare in a frying pan, with rice), and delicious "Buta-Kimu," fried rice with pork and kimchee
  
• We have two giant funny Japanese signs posted on our Signs & Stickers page, which are both useful and wacky. One says "No parking" (for cars" and the other says "No bicycle parking."
  
• A rare toy for anyone who ever loved Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato, we've got a very cool, very rare PVC figure of Mori Yuki, aka Nova, complete with her 70's style holster, gun, and stand - see this cool item on the anime & toys page
  
• Finally, we've got a bunch of odds and ends on the Wacky Things from Japan page, including cute greetings cards with outrageous English on them ("I'm glad to know you're fine. I don't meet you recently."), some beautiful rolls of Japanese 'washi' paper suitable for use as wrapping paper, wrapping for flowers or for use in many crafts, and more!
  

Okay, take care and see you on the site!

Greetings from J-List May 26, 2001

Hello and greetings from J-List on this lovely Saturday afternoon.

Today was the summer Sports Day at my kids' kindergarten, and all the kids and parents spent the morning running relays and three-legged races, doing tug-of-war, and watching the kids show off their athletic skills. At the end of the day, the kids thanked their parents for working hard and gave their fathers framed pictures the kids had drawn. Rina, my daughter, must have been influenced by the pictures the other kids in her class were drawing, because I came out looking pretty Japanese, complete with black hair...

When you live in Japan, you learn to "adjust" your language so that the people you interact with will understand you. A "fan" in Japanese could be an electric fan, but the kind you hold in your hand is, to the Japanese mind, a completely different concept. A tissue is always a tissue, never a "Kleenex," although Kleenex is a popular brand here -- "milk" is the powdered stuff you put in your coffee, not what comes out of a cow. In a similar vein, there are several words that just "work" differently from word s in English, and it causes some confusion to the English-speaking mind. For example, there are two words for "cold" in Japanese: samui (for the air around you) and tsumetai (for anything that is cold to the touch, like ice cream). Gaijin invariably use th e wrong word when speaking Japanese. Also, the concepts of cold water (mizu) and hot water (yu or o-yu) are completely separate words, something that takes more than a bit of getting used to.

Yasu and Tomo are enjoying an Evangelion renaissance. Having missed the classical anime series when it was on the air in 1995, they're watching the series now, renting the episodes at the local Family Book. Every day at work we discuss the new psychologica l elements that come up in the show. If you like Eva and bishoujo games, I recommend you take a look at Season of the Sakura, which is basically a game based on the last 5 minutes of the Eva series (right down to several of the characters)

We're happy to announce that Borderline 3 ~Frozen Beach~ is shipping (and early, too!). This is an excellent work of hentai CG by illustrator Sakaki Naomoto, which we think is just wonderful. He's taken, ah, extra care with the detail of the 100% uncensore d graphics, too, and the result is a very erotic collection of "doujin" anime computer images -- something unavailable even to Japanese fans of this artist's work. The "click to zoom" feature on the images is great, too.

We've got a special announcement for the weekend: announcing the J-List 10% off sale. During the changeover from our current site, we're going to give 10% all magazine, photobook, anime art book and manga items on our site. This is our way of thanking you for your understanding while we work on the changeover. The temporary order form we've got up and running is working well, by the way, but if you find entering the items you want to buy into the form is cumbersome, we can accept orders either through our s ecure email form at https://rook.axnet.net/pages/virtual/jlist/orderjlist_secure.html or else directly via email. This is an excellent chance to pick up on some fantastic magazine, photobook and manga items from Japan!

Also, we've permanently lowered the price of one of our most popular video series, the Stark Nakedness Sports Series. This is a great and wacky video series from Soft on Demand that puts "zenra" (all-nude) Japanese girls in various athletic settings, from snow sports to nude underwater sports, "stealing into the room at night" and more. The #1 "Zenra" series video, though, is the classic "64 Zenra Girls in Rock-Paper-Scissors." 64 girls play jan-ken-pon with each other; the loser has to take off an article of clothing. Repeat. (The Zenra videos can be found on the SOD Main videos page.) In the last update, we talked about Morishita Kurumi's newest video release in which she actually performs with director TOHJIRO. Unfortunately, the item wasn't posted to the SOD video pages. We've corrected this now, sorry for the confusion ^_^

One of our most popular games over the past couple of years has been Nocturnal Illusion. One of the first bishoujo games ported to Windows 95, it features many nice characters and is popular with bishoujo gamers. Unfortunately, we had just sold out of the game -- or so we thought. The Gods of Pretty Girl Games smiled, and we found another 20 or so copies of this game in San Diego. If you're interested in this nice game, we suggest you get it before it sells out again.

We're glad to hear feedback from CM-Watch (http://www.cm-watch.com). This is a nice site (IMHO) where you can download a slice of Japan, in the form of Japanese TV commercials. There are many commercials we'll be showing you, from Brad Pitt's "Roots" coffee commercials to the infamous Simpsons CC Lemon ads. You can subscribe yourself to the CM-Watch updates mailing list to receive emails when the page is updated -- or if you like, just reply to this email and ask us to add you to the CM-Watch list. You need Quicktime 4 or 5 installed to view the movies on the site.

Greetings from J-List May 22, 2001

Hello again from J-List, your neighborhood friend in Japan.

Have you ever spoken to a Japanese person and wondered why they make agreeing noises while you're talking? This is aspect of Japanese speech called "aizuchi," basically "agreeing sounds" that speakers make when having a conversation. In Japanese, I could be explaining something that happened to me, and the person I'm speaking to would say things like "ee" (yes), "so" (that's true), and "ne" (a general word of agreement). It may sound funny, but in Japanese, it's necessary to show that you're listening to the other person -- not making these noises shows you're not paying attention, and the person you're talking with is likely to ask you what's wrong. The trouble is when you carry aizuchi into English, and butt into what the other person is saying with "that's right" and "yes."

Well, I'm sorry to say that Sachiko (who worked at J-List two years ago) hasn't had much luck getting a career as a "talent" since she moved to Tokyo. She's working at a company that provides Internet telephony services, and is doing well. However, Kaori and I were surprised to learn that the daughter of our old boss (the owner of the school we used to work for, which has since gone bankrupt) has debuted as a singer and is now famous all over Japan. It floored us to learn that Yumiko-chan, the half-Japanese, half-American girl who was a silly 13-year-old when I last saw her (I remember playing Nintendo with her at her house) is now Fukuhara Yumiko, and is being managed by the same company that manages Max and Speed's Uehara Takako. She's even singing the title song to a Japanese drama. See her picture at http://www.rising.ne.jp/web/release/fukuhara_what.html . It just goes to show, you never know.

Do you detect the scent of minty freshness? There's something new in the air, and I'm happy to report that it's.....CM-Watch! CM-Watch (http://www.cm-watch.com) is a site we launched where you could download Japanese TV commercials (called "CMs" in Japanese), but the site had been on hiatus while I grapled with being too busy to update the page. Thanks to the hard work of my good friend James, the new webmaster, CM-Watch lives, and with new Japanese TV commercials for you to check out. CM-Watch is a little service we make available to you, the Japanophiles of the world, because we think Japan is such a nifty place. Enjoy! (Requires Quicktime, available at http://www.quicktime.com/.)

For this evening's update, we've got a nice volley of cool things from Japan for you, including:

• First, some excellent new magazines, including the new Gal's Dee (featuring the slender but busty Yoshizawa Nanako), a new issue of the always-popular and never-enough-in-stock OK, and more
  
• For magazine/CD-ROM combo lovers, we've got a rare item -- Live Gal's Shower, which features both a full-color magazine as well as 2 CD-ROMs (Mac&PC Compatible) filled with excellent "bukkake" fun for you
  
• If you love Japan's beautiful photobooks, we've got several all-new hardcover photobooks, including the lovely nude photobook of the Cherry Bombers (the "anti" Mini-suka Police). We also have fresh stock of several of the "Bishoujo Memorial" photobooks.
  
• We've gotten in more stock of the very nice Cho Very Good photobook vol. 2, featuring a slew of Japan's most lovely AV idols
  
• We have a major update to our manga pages, with fresh stock of dozens of excellent manga, including some of our most popular manga and items that had been backordered for many weeks (and which might not be available once our current stock runs out). Remember to check both page 1 and page 2 for new items
  
• For doujinshi fans, we have fresh stock of the Great Work of Alchemy erotic doujiinshi, featuring great erotic themes
  
• We've got fresh stock of the popular Crystal Card 2000 vol. 2 series, featuring beautiful collectible cards of Japan's most lovely AV idols
  
• For hentai fans, see vol. 3 & 4 of Ohno Tetsuya's very lovely Mei King bishoujo anime DVD -- we'll be the first to admit it's a pricey series, but the beauty of these characters makes it worth it
  
• If you love SOD's daring brand of "Indies" AV, we've got another nice item for you -- a new "teasing the penis" series video, featuring four "kogal" types who have great fun with some lucky cocks
  
• Also for SOD, a great item for "chikan" (pervert on a train) fans: a super DVD featuring two complete hours of train-touching play and more
  
• For fans of Love Hina and Card Captor Sakura, we're happy to announce that our order of these "bilingual" comics has come in, and we've posted the items to the anime & toys page. These great manga include both English and the original Japanese, and are great for collectors or students
  
• For fans of Japan's lovely idols, we've got a daring DVD directed by the famous AV director TOHJIRO of Soft on Demand, who films the lovely Matsumoto Miku in ways that are far more erotic than filming her nude would be -- a truly amazing "hybrid" idol DVD (it's region-2 unfortunately)
  
• We have fresh stock of our silly "Looking for a beautiful woman" sticker on the Signs, Stickers and Headbands page
  
• We've got a bunch of new items on our Wacky Things from Japan pages, too, including the ultimate belt clip for your portable phone (go ahead, be Japanese), cute little "Hello Kitty" bottles that you can use to carry shampoo, contact lens solution, and other things, and more!
  

The link to the Anime categories was broken during the weekend, making those pages inaccessible. The link has been fixed -- sorry about that. Other than this hiccup, the "cartless" shopping cart is working well, and there have been no more problems with orders at all. The new J-List page is coming along nicely, and will include all the features that have been requested for so long, including full product search. Thanks for your patience while we work on the new site.

Greetings from J-List May 14, 2001

Hail and well met from your friends in Japan, J-List!

The Japanese may think that Brad Pitt is the sexiest man in the world, but to many Japanese fans, the hottest guy is Kimura Takuya, of the talented singing group SMAP (they also cook gourmet means in their spare time). One of the top Japanese "talents," he can sing, he can dance, and his TV dramas are always huge money-makers, especially when he stars with pretty actress Matsu Takako. He is to Brad Pitt what Matsuda Seiko is to Madonna, and the fact that he advertises Levi's in Japan while BP does the Edwin Jeans commercials seals their yin-yang relationship. See some pictures of Kimu-Taku, including some of his Levi's ads, at http://www.geocities.com/youarebest1/index2.html (fair warning, there are popups on this site).

In sports, it's harder to tell who the best-looking Japanese guys are. One contender is Ichiro, the popular baseball player who quit the top spot in Japan's baseball world (at least in making TV commercials, anyway), and went to join the Seattle Mariners. He's a handsome guy, even if he weren't a talented batter (fellow Japanese pitcher Nomo beaned him accidentally in a game last week, which was widely shown all around Japan). But my wife and I agree that the sexiest Japanese "sportsman" (athlete) has to be Nakata, who quit Japan's soccer league and is now a world-class soccer player in Italy. He's also fluent in Italian, which fuels the Euro-philism that all Japanese secretly keep in their hearts. (Remember that part of Peter's Unified Theory of Japan is that they secretly wish they were part of Europe. Why else would they make the DVD region codes for Japan and Europe the same?) You can see pictures of Nakata at http://nakata.net/official/light/document/document001.htm.

For the first update of the week, we've got some nice new items for you, including:

• First, some excellent new Japanese magazines for you, including the new issues of Video Boy and Best Video (two great magazines from Eichi Publishing that let you follow the entire Japan AV world easily), in addition to a special edition of the popular Waffle
  
• For fans of high-quality Japanese erotic photography, we have some nice photobooks for you, including Kurosawa Hitomi's lovely "age 19" photobook, fresh stock of some popular photobooks that had sold out, and more
  
• Bondage fans should check out the "Traditional Bondage in Japan" photobook we've posted (stock is limited though)
  
• For erotic manga fans, we've got a large update, with both new manga posted as well as fresh stock of some very nice full sets of erotic manga that have been popular (but which had sold out and been removed from the manga pages). Be sure to check both pages 1 and 2 for new items.
  
• For anyone who wants to learn more about how to please a woman, famous Japanese AV actor Kato Taka and director TOHJIRO will teach you in their great erotic DVD from Soft on Demand, The Much-treasured Sexual Technique Lecture DVD. This lesson centers around "How to make a woman come."
  
• Everyone love beautiful Japanese women, and Japan's Race Queens are some of the loveliest. By popular demand, we have fresh stock of the very nice (albeit expensive) Gal's Paradise 2000 ~Race Queen Collection Cards~
  
• Also for fans of lovely Japanese girls -- the latest set of Morning Musume collectible idol cards, "Sweet Morning Card II," featuring lovely glossy images of all the beautiful Mo-Musu gals
  
• For anime fans, two very special items only available from Japan -- first, a superb "Laputa Castle in the Sky" figure set (Sheeta, Pazu and the super-cool Laputa robot!), and from Banpresto, a highly detailed Lupin III figure set (full sets available!)
  
• In Japan, there are two brands of mayonnaise -- Ajinomoto and Kewpie. We've had Ajinomoto's in stock on our Japanese snacks & food page for a few weeks, and now we've added Kewpie -- so you can compare and decide for yourself which Japanese mayonnaise is the best
  
• On our funny Japanese signs & posters page, see new wacky wooden signs with interesting Japanese proverbs printed on them (including one of my favorites, "Boys be ambitious!")
  
• Also on our Wacky Things from Japan pages, we've got some great new items for you that only J-List could bring you -- including Hello Kitty toothbrushes, deluxe Japanese fans with wonderful Japanese pictures printed on them, origami paper, and more!
  

J-List sells many wacky and cool things from Japan, that aren't available to people living outside of Japan otherwise. One cool thing we love to sell is Japanese gum, with all the delicious flavors that sound funny at first, but are great once you try them. Kaori recommends the delicious sugarless gum containing Xylitol, a remarkable product from Finland that protects against cavities and tastes great. We've got several varieties of this delicious gum in stock, so check out our Japanese gum pages!

Greetings from J-List May 11, 2001

Hello again from your friends in Japan, J-List!

The Japanese use a lot of English words in their daily life, and depending on your age, spoken Japanese is often peppered with English words like stance, better, pretty, and so on. But when speaking Japanese, you have to "convert" the "English" words a bit before using them. The word "energy" is used in English, but it's pronounced with a hard G -- if you want people to understand you, you learn to pick up the new pronunciation, although it sounds odd at first. "Vitamin" is pronounced "bitamin," with a stress on the second syllable. Sometimes words come in via England, so they're unfamiliar to Americans like me -- a car's hood (bonetto), for example. And some "English" words aren't even English, but come from other languages, such as arubaito (part time job), anket (questionnaire), karte (a medical chart), and ruksak (a backpack). Because all foreign words are written in the Japanese katakana writing system, Japanese people tend to think that all these words are English.

Well, White Day is approaching. This is a silly Japanese day in which men must give a gift -- usually white chocolate -- to women who gave them chocolate on Valentine's Day. Convenience stores jump on the occasion to sell all manner of silly gifts, including many forms of chocolate. Men have an obligation to give chocolate back to people who gave them something, and shops know that they will sell a lot of "obligation chocolate" (giri choco) by March 14.

After several years of mocking Mazda's Bongo Friendee mini-van for having the strangest English of any Japanese car (right up there with the Mitsubishi Thanks Chariot and Toyota's Super Saloon), the versatility of this interesting, fun car finally wore me down, and we bought one. The continuing poor performance of the Japanese economy means that auto makers have to work hard and compete on price, so that helped our decision. The way you buy a car in Japan is quite different from how it's done in the U.S. Here, you always order a car and pick it up in 2-3 weeks, rather than getting it off a dealers' lot that day. Virtually all dealers are operated by the auto makers directly -- thus, you find only Mazda's at the local Mazda dealer (or maybe some Fords, since Ford owns most of Mazda). And as with deciding the date of your wedding, it's important to pick your car up on a "lucky day" according to special Buddhist calendar, to avoid problems and unhappiness. You can see the Bongo Friendee at http://www.friendee.mazda.co.jp/

For this evening's update, we've got some very nice items for you, including:

• First, some excellent new erotic magazines from Japan, including the new issues of the all-Japanese Penthouse Japan and Penthouse Special, which feature all Japanese models photographed by Japanese photographers, and more
  
• For fans of the popular magazine + Video CD combo items, we've got a special item for you: the DVD & Video CD Perfect Guide IV, a massive all-color magazine with three VCDs filled with great erotic clips and "quickies" from a variety of genres
  
• We've got more one-shot issues of older magazines at the of Magazine page 2
  
• For leg fetish fans, we've got fresh stock of several items for you on the Leg Fetish photobooks page -- including a great new item, Costume Play Sisters, featuring a slew of erotic leg fetish cosplay
  
• If you love Japan's unique S&M photobooks and related items, check out the new items on the Gouka-Bon page, including SM Net, a magazine + dual-Video CD combo item for S&M and bondage lovers
  
• For photobook fans, we have several very nice all-new hardcover photobooks, as well as fresh stock of some popular items that had sold out
  
• There are several excellent new erotic wide mangas posted to the manga pages, including new titles from Tsukasa and Hit Comics, as well as fresh stock of several popular items (including some great large-breast manga items)
  
• Love dojinshi? We've got three, count them, three great erotic dojinshi from the Angel Pain series, including stock of the popular all-color Angel Pain vol. 5
  
• For yaoi lovers, we have the handsome new Be Boy Gold, the deluxe erotic yaoi manga monthly with nearly 500 pages of great artwork for you
  
• The "Puchi Angel" offering from Soft on Demand, featuring pure, pretty Japanese girls and lots of wonderful sailor school uniform themes, was a big hit -- so we've added two new videos in this popular series. See them on the SOD Main page (for the ones we have in stock) or the SOD special-order page (if we run out of stock on hand)
  
• For fans of the lovely Morishita Kurumi, there's a super erotic release on DVD (region 2), the Bright Blue Wood, with *90* minutes of excellent erotic AV by this special lady
  
• By customer request, we've created a great new page for you -- Anime DVDs, where we'll carry the unique anime DVDs released here in Japan. these anime DVDs are always of the highest quality, and while they are expensive, they give a lot of value (6 episodes per disc, long playing times). For starters, we've got the first two discs of Mach Go Go Go, the original series known as Speed Racer outside Japan, and the fantastic OVA Complete Collection of Iczer One -- with the entire anime series on one DVD!
  
• We love updating our Wacky Things from Japan pages, but unfortunately, we got so much cool, bizarre stuff in stock that the page got overcrowded. So, we've made a Wacky Things (Cute) page to go with our Wacky Things (Main) page. We've added some great items to this page, including a super Hello Kitty box with lid and drawer (so cute for your desk) as well as fresh stock of many popular items
  
• Finally, our popular Wacky Things from Japan page has also been updated, with a spiffy back massager (great for people who get itchy backs), the ultimate milk carton sealer (certified as being "really cool" by my mother, who bought them as gifts when she came to Japan), and more.
  

Remember that you can get any three of our $24.95 bishojo anime games for $70, shipping in US/Canada included. This is like getting $20 off, and it's a great deal. You can choose from Hentai Anime Poker, Three Sisters' Story, Season of the Sakura, Runaway City, Nocturnal Illusion, May Club, or even the enigmatic Transfer Student (which really, really come out some day). These games are in English, and are uncensored, so they're really cool.

Greetings from J-List May 9, 2001

Hello from Japan, where a car's blinker is called a "winker."

One of the more enjoyable pasttimes to engage in when learning Japanese is to memorize useless kanji for words that aren't usually written in kanji (mainly because the kanji are too hard for Japanese to remember). One way to write the word "urusai" (which means "loud" or "annoying" and is the basis of the name of the 80s anime Urusei Yatsura) is literally "May flies" (as in, the dirty little insects that reproduce so much in the month of May). I've never figured out why Japan is overrun with flies in May, but they're everywhere, buzzing and basically being "urusai." We've got fly paper hung in the kitchen to keep them from getting into the rice cooker.

Japan is one country where a pocketful of change can be a serious amount of money. Because the Japanese use coins for 100 and 500 yen denominations of their money (roughly equal to US$1 and $5), it's quite common for a handful of change to be a lot of money indeed -- $20 or more. I'm all for the U.S. Government taking the bold step of eliminating the $1 bill altogether, without giving any choice to consumers. A coin is just as easy to use as a bill, and the savings from using coins over paper for the $1 unit would be in the millions. I'm sure it'll happen right after the Metric System gets adopted, however...

In addition to these cool CD-ROM titles, we've got some great items for you, including:

• Many new 18+ items
  
• For fans of our unique Japanese snack foods, we've got a major update, including fresh stock of many candy items, Pokemon gummi, Pocky and Toppo, delicious miso soup with asari (clams) in it, sweet dried plums, and more
  
• We have more of our trademark Silly Wooden Signs with funny messages in Japanese on them, including the most popular sign we've ever carried -- the famous "Do not urinate here" sign
  
• New items on the Wacky Things from Japan page include the ultimately cute trash can for your desk, a beautiful bamboo flower pot made of charred bamboo, We've also added fresh stock of many items that had sold out, including several varieties of our popular $5 Japanese-English dictionaries.
  

Imagine yourself walking down the street. Suddenly, you run into some Japanese people, preferably the cute kind. They might nod and walk on by, but if you're wearing a funny Japanese T-shirt from J-List, who knows what could happen? We've got T-shirts that communicate cool messages like, "I want to be Japanese" or "I'm looking for a Japanese girlfriend." If you want to confuse and confound just for the fun of it, how about "Hentai gaijin" (perverted foreigner) or the perplexing "Self-loathing." If you admire the beauty of Chinese characters, we recommend "Daikoku-bashira" (big black pillar) or our "Happiness" T-shirts. If you secretly wish you were Japanese, send that message with a J-List shirt, too. And since we now offer free shipping on many of our T-shirts, as we try to make room for new designs, it's a great time to check out what we've got to offer.

Greetings from J-List May 7, 2001

Hello again from Japan, where a movie release is called "road show." We were slowed down last week by both the Golden Week problems as well as some server hiccups, but we're back, with a great update for J-List fans. The page is working fine now, although not that we are keeping most of the large images off the server to avoid the problems coming back (please forgive our dead links).

Well, Japan feels just a little more like home to me, now that the local Toys "R" Us is open. I took the kids there for a treat on opening day, and was surprised to see thousands of Japanese, getting into the spirit of American consumerism. On the other hand, what the Market gives, the Market taketh away: Burger King has unfortunately retreated from their foray into the Tokyo fast food market, and has sold the leases to their dozen or so stores to -- ugh -- Lotteria. Back to eating at the Subway in Ocha-no-mizu.

All languages have different elements which are new to learners coming in from other languages. In Japanese, there are long and short vowels -- the sounds "ko" and "koh" are two completely different phonetic concepts in Japanese, just as L and R are in English. It can be confusing when learning Japanese: ojisan means "uncle" but ojiisan (note the extra "i") means "grandfather." The long/short sounds are so completely separate that Japanese don't even hear a similarity in the sounds. I once had a student named Ohno Yoko (Yoko, not Yohko). When I pointed out that her name was similar to the wife of the former Beatle (which is Yohko, with the long vowel), she told me she'd never thought of that in her life.

The long/short vowels also cause problems when transliterating Japanese into English. For example, Akimoto Yuna's name is really Yuuna, not Yuna (long vowel), but it's tedious and pointless to write her name the "correct" way when it makes no difference to how the name is pronounced. At J-List, we generally transliterate names and words in whatever way makes them shortest and clearest, especially from the standpoint of pronunciation -- thus, we'd use "Yuna" in the above example. We usually write words like bishoujo, doujinshi as bishojo and dojinshi, although it's technically less accurate. Sometimes AV actresses have an "official" English spelling, or one that's very accepted (Tohno Natsuko, Ohura Anna), we usually use those. It's a difficult situation -- the multiple spellings is a big challenge for search engines, for example -- but it's all part of Japanese.

Announcing the Spring Video Sale! We're a bit overstocked on our popular AV videos, so we've moved tons of titles to the Discount Video page. In addition to free SAL shipping, until the end of May you can buy 3 and get the 4th video free. The videos must be in stock (not a problem, we've got hundreds in stock now). The lowest priced video is the "free" one, so if you choose four videos of similar price, it's like getting 25% off.

For the first update of a fresh week, we've got some nice items for you, including:

• Many new 18+ items
  
• For Japanese idol fans, we've got stock of the newest Morning Musume card set -- the Priname Petit Card series -- only $2.50 per pack!
  
• There is fresh stock of the silly wooden sign that has "Now being punished" (oshioki-chu) on it
  
• We have limited stock (one set of each, actually) of FULL SETS of the Cardcaptor Sakura keychain and Cardcaptor Sakura stationary set -- both very lovely! See the Anime Snacks page for these items.
  
• We have fresh stock of several cool items on our Wacky Things from Japan, including the surprisingly popular train/bus pass holder, Japanese vocabulary word cards, wacky Japanese notebooks with funny English written on them, and more. We've also added new items, including a very nice new Japanese "noren" room curtain (add a touch of Japanese style to your room), a wonderful Japanese pouch that can hold your digital camera or MP3 player, and more.
  

We're looking for a person knowledgeable about Japan's bishojo games, who can help work up an article for publication in a major adult magazine. If you have a writing background and are preferably published, please talk to us. Thanks!

Greetings from J-List May 5, 2001

Hello again from your friends in Japan, J-List!

The Japanese use a lot of English words in their daily life, and depending on your age, spoken Japanese is often peppered with English words like stance, better, pretty, and so on. But when speaking Japanese, you have to "convert" the "English" words a bit before using them. The word "energy" is used in English, but it's pronounced with a hard G -- if you want people to understand you, you learn to pick up the new pronunciation, although it sounds odd at first. "Vitamin" is pronounced "bitamin," with a stress on the second syllable. Sometimes words come in via England, so they're unfamiliar to Americans like me -- a car's hood (bonetto), for example. And some "English" words aren't even English, but come from other languages, such as arubaito (part time job), anket (questionnaire), karte (a medical chart), and ruksak (a backpack). Because all foreign words are written in the Japanese katakana writing system, Japanese people tend to think that all these words are English.

Well, White Day is approaching. This is a silly Japanese day in which men must give a gift -- usually white chocolate -- to women who gave them chocolate on Valentine's Day. Convenience stores jump on the occasion to sell all manner of silly gifts, including many forms of chocolate. Men have an obligation to give chocolate back to people who gave them something, and shops know that they will sell a lot of "obligation chocolate" (giri choco) by March 14.

After several years of mocking Mazda's Bongo Friendee mini-van for having the strangest English of any Japanese car (right up there with the Mitsubishi Thanks Chariot and Toyota's Super Saloon), the versatility of this interesting, fun car finally wore me down, and we bought one. The continuing poor performance of the Japanese economy means that auto makers have to work hard and compete on price, so that helped our decision. The way you buy a car in Japan is quite different from how it's done in the U.S. Here, you always order a car and pick it up in 2-3 weeks, rather than getting it off a dealers' lot that day. Virtually all dealers are operated by the auto makers directly -- thus, you find only Mazda's at the local Mazda dealer (or maybe some Fords, since Ford owns most of Mazda). And as with deciding the date of your wedding, it's important to pick your car up on a "lucky day" according to special Buddhist calendar, to avoid problems and unhappiness. You can see the Bongo Friendee at http://www.friendee.mazda.co.jp/

For this evening's update, we've got some very nice items for you, including:

• First, some very nice 18+ products on our 18+ pages
  
• By customer request, we've created a great new page for you -- Anime DVDs, where we'll carry the unique anime DVDs released here in Japan. these anime DVDs are always of the highest quality, and while they are expensive, they give a lot of value (6 episodes per disc, long playing times). For starters, we've got the first two discs of Mach Go Go Go, the original series known as Speed Racer outside Japan, and the fantastic OVA Complete Collection of Iczer One -- with the entire anime series on one DVD!
  
• We love updating our Wacky Things from Japan pages, but unfortunately, we got so much cool, bizarre stuff in stock that the page got overcrowded. So, we've made a Wacky Things (Cute) page to go with our Wacky Things (Main) page. We've added some great items to this page, including a super Hello Kitty box with lid and drawer (so cute for your desk) as well as fresh stock of many popular items
  
• Finally, our popular Wacky Things from Japan page has also been updated, with a spiffy back massager (great for people who get itchy backs), the ultimate milk carton sealer (certified as being "really cool" by my mother, who bought them as gifts when she came to Japan), and more.
  

Remember that you can get any three of our $24.95 bishojo anime games for $70, shipping in US/Canada included. This is like getting $20 off, and it's a great deal. You can choose from Hentai Anime Poker, Three Sisters' Story, Season of the Sakura, Runaway City, Nocturnal Illusion, May Club, or even the enigmatic Transfer Student (which really, really come out some day). These games are in English, and are uncensored, so they're really cool.

Greetings from J-List May 3, 2001

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Greetings from J-List April 27, 2001

Greetings from Japan, the home of the Toyota FunCarGo and Crunky chocolate.

Well, after many years, Fox's long-running TV show 90210 has finally ended here in Japan. Shown on Saturday nights on NHK at 11 pm since time out of mind, the show had many Japanese fans, who watched it in Japanese, or if they wanted to practice their English, with English turned on. Kelly, with her small, demure body and beautiful golden hair, is by far the most popular character among Japanese fans. Nearly all the foreigners I know watched the show, all of them saying things like, "I wouldn't get caught dead watching this back home." But when you're an expat in Japan, you learn to adapt.

One woman holds the key to Japan's perceptions of movies, including what they watch, when they watch it, and how they feel when they watch it. Her name is Toda Natsuko, and she's the Carl Zeiss of the movie translation world. All studios clamor to get her to translate their movies, and any movie that opens in Japanese theaters without the honored "Translation: Toda Natsuko" credit can expect to miss its financial goals. Translation through a medium like subtitles, which must be short enough to be read easily and clearly, but sufficiently accurate to carry the meaning of the film, is a difficult process, but Japanese moviegoers like Ms. Toda's translations the best.

Well, Golden Week is upon us. A week during which several national holidays happen to fall, Golden Week this year isn't actually a week long -- it's two long weekends with a normal break in the middle. Golden Week is an important time for Japanese to enjoy leisure activities, and as a result, no matter where you go, there are mobs of people trying to take advantage of the holidays. Of course, the Internet rests for no Japanese holiday, so the J-List staff will be stippling our holidays, to make sure everything goes smoothly during the week.

We've updated the top 5 list for the past week, too.

For the weekend's update, we've got our usual cool volley of interesting items for you, including:

• First, many interesting new 18+ products
  
• For fans of the wonderful manga and anime Love Hina, we have a very special item -- the next 4 anime DVDs in the series. Each of these long-playing DVDs comes with a great limited edition PVC figure from the anime series -- a great item, and hard to find!
  
• We have the ultimate Mobile Suit Gundam toy ever seen, a wonderful high-end fully poseable recreation from Bandai, on the anime & toys page
  
• Also on the anime page, we've posted the next 3 volumes of the popular Cardcaptor Sakura bilingual comic, so you can enjoy the great manga in English -- with Japanese also written on the page, for those who want to use manga to larn Japanese
  
• We've got fresh stock of several sizes of our popular Wacky Japanese T-shirts, for those who want to sport a wacky Japanese message
  
• For Japanese snack and food fans, we've got some new items -- a new deluxe box of Japanese green tea, and a new twist on our furikake -- delicious beef & sukiyaki flavor!
  
• Finally, on our Wacky Things from Japan update for today, we've got some really cool traditional things from Japan, including fashionable paper parasols, a deluxe wind chime, cute hooks for your room that say "For your agreeable life," and more!
  

Remember that J-List is having a sale on our popular Japanese T-shirts, to clear stock out and make room for new and interesting designs. You can choose from messages that are beautiful for the aesthetic value of the kanji -- the Chinese character for "long life and happiness" (or as we've interpreted it, Live Long and Prosper), messages that will amuse ("Watashi wa H" which means "I'm perverted"), or more practical messages, such as "Looking for a Japanese Girlfriend." All our shirts are 100% cotton Hanes Comfort-T's, printed in the USA, so you don't need to worry about Japanese sizes. Check out our cool shirts today!

Greetings from J-List April 23, 2001

Hello and greetings once again from Japan!

Well, Universal Studios Osaka is finally a reality, and everyone in Japan is being bombarded with marketing messages from the theme park, trying to get them to go spend their money there. Arnold Schwartzenegger (universally known as "Shuwa-chan" here in Japan) was in Osaka recently to help promote the opening. They did the silly things they do on Japanese TV when foreigners come to visit, gushing about them to no end, and poking fun at them, too -- the gave Arnold a Japanese writing brush and tried to get him to copy some kanji, to see how it turned out. He gave up and wrote "I'll be back" in English.

There are certain grammatical structures that work differently in Japanese than in English. In English, we have two concepts for pointing at objects -- here/there, this/that, etc. But in Japanese, there are "location association" concepts -- here, there, and over there (farther away). Location is expressed with koko (here, where I am), soko (there, where you are) and asoko (over there, where a third person may be). There are little nuances that come out these words. Asoko (over there) is a euphemism for a person's genital area, for times when using a more direct word isn't desirable. Acchi (another word meaning "over there") has some negative meanings as well, and "acchi no hito" (the person from over there) is a euphemism that refers to foreigners -- the people from far outside. Incidentally, listen to Japanese speak, and you might notice a tendency differentiate between "this" as an adjective ("this apple") and "this" as a noun ("I bought this"), using "this one" instead of "this" in the latter case.

We've reorganized some of the J-List pages a little big. First of all, we now have DVD Page 1 and DVD page 2 (with lower-priced items being posted on page 2), as well as a new Soft on Demand code-free DVD page, to celebrate the fact that they're releasing all DVDs as region free now.

For the first update of the week, we've got some nice items for you, including:

• Many new 18+ items
  
• For fans of Japanese manga, we've got two very interesting items: *bilingual* comics from Japan of Love Hina and Cardcaptor Sakura, in English with Japanese written to the side of the speech balloons -- great for both collectors and students
  
• New items on our Japanese snacks page include some tasty new flavors of konnyaku jelly -- as well as lower prices on much of our stock of interesting Japanese snack and food items
  
• We've got new wacky things from Japan for you too, including all-new Japanes maps (a map of Japan and a map of the world, with Japan right in the center), new books to help you learn hiragana and katakana, an authentic Japanese abacus, the ultimate condiment holder for your tabletop, and more of our amazingly popular Hello Kitty chopsticks
  

Thanks for being a part of J-List!

Greetings from J-List April 20, 2001

Hello and greetings from Japan, on this quiet Friday evening.

There are many interesting things you notice about the Japanese when you live in Japan -- all highly subjective, of course. They tend to not eat bread crusts, for one thing, and in fact, Japanese bread is sold in supermarkets without the heels -- which might explain why Japanese women are seemingly all constipated. Japanese people never drink root beer, but most can drink Dr. Pepper. Japanese who try Mexican refried beans usually don't like them, because they're not sweet as Japanese beans are -- but if they live overseas for a year or more, they usually come around. And for some reason, all Japanese girls' shoe sizes seem to be either 23 or 23.5 centimeters.

Money is another interesting issue. Discussing money is quite a delicate thing, and the subject is always wrapped in layers of Japanese politeness and "keigo" (polite language) when it is brought up. It's not always necessary to talk money directly though. As an English teacher, I've accepted jobs without even mentioning money at all -- and when my pay envelope came, I trusted that it would be sufficient. Similarly, I've hired Japanese artists to do work without bringing up payment. In situations like this, of course, there's a lot of trust on both sides, and neither would want to hurt that trust by taking advantage of the situation. It's all part of living in Japan.

We're just a little big happier, thanks to the opening of our very own freeway. The North Kanto Jidoushado is a freeway that branches off of the Kanto Expressway, allowing us to drive quickly to nearby Maebashi and Takasaki, and take the freeway all the way to Tokyo if we want. In Japan, where city driving is far more common then freeway driving, it takes hours to get anywhere -- a big difference from San Diego, I can tell you. Now we have a little more freedom to go places on the weekends in our Bongo Friendee. Of course, Japanese freeways aren't "free" at all -- if they were, people would use them too much, and they'd be clogged with cars all the time. To go to Takasaki the toll is about $6; to go all the way to Tokyo, it's around $30.

The "top 5" for the past week has been updated, too.

For the weekend's update, we've got an extra special update for you, including:

• First, some killer and rare magazines from Japan, including Cho Very Good!! (kogals doing bad things), Mecha ike! Hot Breast Girls (very nice amateur magazine), and more
  
• We have some very nice all-new photobooks for you, including Yanagi Asuka's very sexy hardcover photobook, fresh stock of several popular items, and more!
  
• If you like Japanese leg fetish books, we've got fresh stock of several items on the leg & stocking fetish photobook page
  
• For fans of Japanese amateur "indies" AV, we have a great new issue of MPEG Indies, featuring two super Video CDs filled with great amateur sex, as well as a full color magazine!
  
• In addition to several all-new volumes of excellent erotic manga from Japan, we've posted a very special item: the complete set of Furita ni Omakase, the masterful erotic manga about Sayuri and Jun, two policewomen who always managed to get into some bizarre sexual situations (the manga is on order with the publisher, please order your copies to ensure you can get your set)
  
• We have some very nice one-shot erotic dojinshi for you, posted to the dojinshi page -- check these out quickly, before they disappear
  
• For fans of busty Japanese AV actresses, we've got a super new video in the "Menu" (lit. "woman's breast") series. This super video features and busty and delicious Kitahara Erika in a great sexual performance for you
  
• For fans of the bold, refreshing Soft on Demand, we've got not one, but two new videos in their popular All Nude Challenger series, in which 108 lovely nude Japanese girls participate in wacky and bizarre nude sports to get money -- very cool!
  
• Also for Japan AV lovers -- a huge volley of sale and discount items, posted on the Videos (discount) page, all with *free shipping*
  
• For erotic DVD fans, we've got a super item -- a new 120 minute sexual performance featuring the hopelessly "kawaii" Hijiri Sayaka, a fresh, lovely Japanese AV performer
  
• Lovers of Japan's elegant and sexy Race Queens should check out the DVD and Idol pages, for two wonderful Race Queen DVDs by Pony Canyon
  
• We have fresh stock of several of our unique Japanese snack & food items, including sake candy (with real sake!) and Sakura Drops, the delicious hard candy that comes in an old-style tin, and boasts over 100 years of history
  
• Also on the snacks & food page, two new flavors of our surprisingly popular Japanese furikake
  
• For fans of beautiful things from Japan, we've posted a very cute Hello Kitty puzzle, along with a fantastic deluxe puzzle featuring a gold reproduction of Haruyo Morita's "Oboro-zuki"
  
• Finally, we've got fresh stock of some cool things from Japan for you, on our Wacky pages -- including the ultimate way to squeeze all the tooth paste out of your
  

J-List sells the finest selection of Wacky Things from Japan that we know of -- and it's not hard finding new things to sell, since Japan is such a Wacky place. We have it all -- everything from Japanese notebooks with funny English on them to clamps for your futon to Hello Kitty toilet paper to rice scoops to handy things for your bath and laundry. We enjoy selling some of these things because it allows you to touch a little piece of Japan. Since most of the items on our Wacky Things from Japan pages are extremely affordable -- from $2 -- we hope you'll check out our stock regularly. We also can't help thinking that many of the bizarre things we're able to bring you from Japan would make perfect gifts for the Japanophile in your life ^_^

Greetings from J-List April 18, 2001

It's another warm April day in Japan, and outside my window, the grasshoppers are warming up for the summer, still two months ago.

If you're ever in Japan, there are some rules you should observe. In many ways, Japan is obsessed with death, and several "faux pais" flow from this. For example, you should never stick chopsticks in your rice straight up ("tachi-bashi"), as this is done as part of a Buddhist funeral ceremony (mothers tell their children "only dead people" can stick their chopsticks in their rice). Similarly, you should never hand a piece of food to someone else with chopsticks, as it violates some taboo that's related to funerals in some way that's beyond gaijin comprehension -- instead, put the piece of food on a place and let the other person take it. Traditionally, you're not supposed to give cups or plates to someone in sets of four, since four in Japanese is "shi" which also means "death." Never give a potted plant to someone in the hospital, as it implies that they'll be in the hospital a long time (hence the need for roots). Other points of politeness are less intense. When going into any house, you take your shoes off, as shoes and feed are considered to be very dirty in Japan (although I've seen Japanese occasionally go quickly past the foyer to get something they forgot, without taking their shoes off).

We did a little spring cleaning last week, and took the opportunity to change the shoji paper on our shoji doors. Shoji are sliding wooden doors with paper glued to them, and they fit very nicely in with Japanese life. They slide sideways, so they don't take up any room cramped Japanese houses, and the traditional use of shoji in Japan brings a healthy Japanese-style to any room, even western-style rooms. The funniest part of re-hanging the shoji is of course ripping the old paper off -- we called on our kids to help us with this, and they go at it with a passion. The shoji paper market is quite large, with many different companies competing to bring the best shoji paper for your shoji doors. Variations include shoji that are hard to tear (they've got cotton fibers in them), shoji you can hang by just running an iron over the paper, and shoji with various interesting patterns woven into the paper.

For anyone who loves beautiful Japanese women, we have a fascinating CG collection on CD-ROM for you -- Skin Conscious vol. 1 & 2. A massive collection of incredibly beautiful hand-painted erotic airbrush images, each of these CD-ROMs is filled with 620+ megabytes of fabulous artwork, with 900 different images in the set, provided at full size for printing out, and with no copy protection. Skin Conscious is being printed right now, but we've posted it for preorders tonight -- order them now and get free shipping! (Skin Conscious is posted on Hentai & Adult Anime --> Hentai CG collections)

In addition to the Skin Conscious collections, we've got the following really cool new items for you:

• We have several nice new erotic magazines from Japan, including some very nice kogal magazines, and more
  
• Something that should sell well is Buru Mani, a lovely deluxe photobook featuring some very pretty girls -- from the publishers of Waffle
  
• For photobook lovers, we've got some great new items for you, including several very nice leg-fetish photobook items on the let photobooks page
  
• For fans of magazine + video CD magazine combos, a great issue of MPEG Typhoon, with excellent amateur AV on two VCDs
  
• Japanese know their fetishes, and one popular fetish is "doctor play." There's a lot of interesting sexual perversion to enjoy in "You can be a gynecologist, too," a magazine + dual Video CD item on the high-end photobooks page
  
• One of the most popular color manga/art books in recent months has been Yui Shop 2, a beautifully erotic all-color book by Toshiki Yui -- but we sold out in about 30 minutes. Well, we've not only got more stock of Yui Shop 2, but by massive customer request, we've got Yui Shop 1, too -- both in stock now!
  
• We have another update to our manga page, of course, with fresh stock of many titles that had been sold out of backordered
  
• We've got *four* new hentai dojinshi, featuring great hentai artwork from Black Cat, Yugioh, and more
  
• Yaoi fans, see the elegant Rigel ~ A winter's constellation on the yaoi page
  
• For fans of Japan's lovely hentai games, we've got a nice issue of Fantasienne for you, with over 260 pages of great info on Japan's current games
  
• For those who appreciate Japan's beauty, we've got several nice photo puzzles posted to the anime page for you to check out
  
• If you love Japanese snacks and gum, we've done a major restock, adding fresh stock of several popular items, including Milky Candy (white milk-flavored caramels, they're great), as well as some of our unique Japanese gum, only available from J-List
  
• See the ultimate Japanese flag sticker for you car on the Wacky Stickers & Signs page
  
• For this evening's "wacky" update, we've got some cool new items, including an all-new version of Japanese "socks glue" (to hold your socks up), an oil sheet for ladies with real gold in it, the ultimate 360 degree swiveling hanger, and more! Check out all the new items!
  

J-List accepts all major credit cards for orders, via the secure order form on our web site. But we also are happy to another forms of payment, such as Paypal and Billpoint. We get several emails a week from people asking if check or money order payment are okay, and the answer is of course yes -- just make an order and choose "check or money order."

Some have asked about the enlarged images that are still now showing up. We've kept many of the images off the server, to keep the hard drive space problem we've been having from coming back. We're hard at work on a permanent fix, and should have the problems taken care of soon!